Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, a world-class medical research corridor, revealed three new building plans last week, including a $52 million UB Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics set for completion in two to three years.
According to Thomas Beecher, the medical campus chairman and president, the bioinformatics research center is set to be over 144,000 square feet in size and will be located in Buffalo's Allentown District, between Ellicott and Virginia Streets.
"This is a big boon for all of our students," Provost Elizabeth Capaldi said. "Related fields like computational chemistry, pharmacogenomics, and other related majors will spawn off of this. There will be a lot of exciting things to study. We will create some very exciting science and be a leader in personalized medicine."
The project also includes a proposed $7 million contract with the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which would extend the Allen Street Subway Station to the other end of Main Street to increase the accessibility of the medical campus.
"The expansion of the subway will be terrific for people in the university community who want to come to the campus for internships or for research opportunities," said Beecher.
According to Capaldi, the center's primary focus will be research in bioinformatics, which is a newly developed field combining computer science and biology. The bioinformatics program began at UB approximately a year ago and is becoming more popular in research institutions around the world.
"Everyone in the country is trying to get in on bioinformatics, but we have the lead because of our good medical school, pharmacy program, and our supercomputer," she said. "We happen to be leaders right now."
UB's bioinformatics Web site states that research in the field centers around maintenance and analysis of information databases, which can lead to the discovery of new cures for diseases.
"There will be wonderful ways to prevent disease," Capaldi said. "It'll make us real proud to see what the scientists in the building discover."
The other two buildings planned for the campus are a Hauptman-Woodward research facility and a Roswell Park research building. Roswell Park is a renowned cancer research institute that already has several research buildings constructed at the site.
"The most immediate impact of this campus will be in clinical care, and the broader and long-ranging benefits will be in teaching and research," Beecher said. "The medical campus will be good for jobs, good for care and good for commerce."
Another advantage of UB's Bioinformatics Center is the hiring of new faculty.
"We expect there will be a fair amount of people hired," Beecher said. "We will be bringing in academicians and researchers that aren't here right now."
According to Capaldi, while the bioinformatics center will be primarily a research facility, there will be opportunities for graduate students to do research, and according to UB's Bioinformatics Web site, there are currently several graduate programs in the area of bioinformatics, pharmacometrics and computational science.
"(The center) will help our national reputation," Capaldi said. "That's good for students - a better reputation for UB helps us all."
